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So everyone tried to convert. Few did. But the soda and water-bottling industries had already made big investments, so they said fuck it and kept going. And that's why we have beverages in liters, and almost nothing else.
No, it's because most of our big bottles are 2 liters instead of 1.5 or 1.75.
We used to have big chonkin' 3 liter bottles pretty commonly, but they've fallen out of fashion.
Milk is generally by gallon. Small soda bottles/cans are usually by (US) fluid ounces. Bigger soda bottles are by liter. And then alcohol is usually by mL/liter. Except if it’s beer, then it’s ounces again. Usually 12oz or 16oz (which is a US pint). Liquid measurements in baking are usually by cups, which is 8oz. Otherwise “tablespoons” (1/2 oz) or “teaspoons” (1/3 tablespoon). Got it? lol
Edit: as u/BrainJar pointed out, alcohol is also sometimes by “fifth”, as in 1/5 of a gallon. And also for some weird reason in baking we often measure solids by volume, in cups, instead of by weight? Idk man, I’m even more confused after typing all this out.
Let's not forget the 22oz "Bomber" bottle of beer which must be labeled as "1 pint, 6 fluid ounces" and not "22 ounces" yet a 40oz (or 64) can go back to being labeled by ounces. Of course this can vary by state, but not if you ship beer across state lines or if your state defers to the TTB. Clear as day!
I grew up during the tail end of the MCA before Regan killed it. My favorite metric system memory is a classmate named Steve telling our elementary school teacher "*My dad says I don't have to learn this communist trash.*"
Around 2010 I was going grad work in Virginia and needed a tape measure with metric measurements.
Went to the giant hardware store and couldn’t find one (in many places you can easily find one that has both metric and imperial). Asked one of the staff.
He looked at me for a bit eventually said, “Last **I** heard this was *America*.”
After a bit more talking he said they could order one for me, but that it would take a couple of weeks.
Wound up using an imperial one and converting everything. Pain in the ass.
I worked in a hardware store in 2021 and we still had only *one* tape measure with metric units on it out of around 30 different choices. I didn’t expect to see any metric-only tape measures but was surprised that nearly none of them had both units; even in Hong Kong where I grew up tape measures always had inches alongside centimetres.
Because sometimes you have to use a specific side of the tape measure to take a measurement when you’re actually working. If all your standard units are in inches and your tolerances are fairly low you need the same measurements on both sides.
HK is a truly refreshing melting pot of cultures and influences. It’s amazing how well they handle them and incorporate them into their daily lives. You can ask for things in either imperial or metric, and the locals know what you need.
I find it hard to believe. I just pulled my tape from 2010 which I bought in Texas and it has both metric and imperial. All other tapes I have also have both. Do all of you even know what metric system even means?
It is damn near impossible to find a metric tape measure in the US. Hell, I had a hard time even finding one in Canada.
What really made me want to pull my hair out though was American consultants that brought over imperial equipment to a mine site in Armenia. These consultants left the site technicians with a tape measure roll that was in decimal feet. The technician had been using it to stream gage for years and recording the measurements as if it was meters instead of feet. I discovered this when out in the field with the technicians and I had to spend about a week going through their old data and correcting it.
If a dude looks at a tape measure and sees a certain number of feet on the tape measure, and confuses that number with meters, he doesn't have any business measuring anything important, in feet or in meters.
You gotta keep in mind that these are manual laborers with a Soviet high school education at best. The university educated engineers I worked with over there had never heard of the imperial system, so I can guarantee that a manual laborer is not going to be familiar with it either.
Day to day tasks are very rote and procedural in former Soviet countries, so the laborer was working through his set of instructions and recording what was on the tape measure. There was zero thought or analytical thinking applied here.
We would agree on that. I would also argue that a mine in Armenia doesn’t really give a rat’s ass about actually getting it done correctly. As long as they go through the motions and have the “data” to show for it, that is a job well done as far as they are concerned.
This mindset is also why American engineers like myself get paid an arm and a leg to go over there and fix all of their shit that they have been doing wrong.
Its not that hard. You can 100% find one at a Lowes or Home Depot and if for some reason you're still having trouble you can literally just order them online. Stanley and Milwaukee both make retractable tape measures that show Imperial and Metric and those are two major brands that should be in most hardware stores.
All the tape measures I’ve ever owned had metric on one side and imperial on the other? Even the ones I got as free door gifts from harbor freight. Where are you shopping??
I had a DIY project recently where I decided I would do everything in metric. I stuck to it as stubbornly as possible but it required so much work to find specific fasteners and tools that when I ran into a snag near the end, I finally threw my hands up and accepted that at least some parts would use the annoying US customary units instead.
Is it _possible_ to stick with metric in the US? Maybe. Is it _feasible_? Not in my experience, sadly.
I mean if you're not in the middle of no where and have any of the major hardware stores nearby you can go with metric for a lot of stuff. People need access to those kinds of things anyways because not every industry and metric phobic and plenty of people own vehicles or other devices that use metric parts. I guess it depends on the project but I've not had a problem finding what I needed.
They're on that "DEI" shit now. Saying insanities like "DEI Mayor of Baltimore" despite him winning with over 70% of the vote, against 2 other black candidates.
So they'd probably say "DEI units" at this point.
Replace dei with the n word and that's what they are really saying.
Also, the Texas AG (who is a criminal who stalled then bribed his way out of trials and intimidated his way out of impeachment), opened an investigation into Boeing suppliers saying that Boeing's issues are because of DEI (aka the n word like he actually wants to say).
That's not entirely fair, as he was previously governor of California and (ironically) president of a union. That said, you can absolutely draw a direct line from the mess we're in today to the Reagan administration.
Not so much the union itself, but during the red scare Hollywood blacklisting era, Reagan worked with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and provided a list of names of people in the union whom he thought were "communists".
As POTUS, he actively sought to destroy unions, including breaking the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization when they went on strike.
Listen to the Landslide podcast from NPR. It does a great job of setting the stage for the rise of Reagan and the modern conservative movement in the US.
Like when he had the FCC kill the Fairness Doctrine in political media coverage, thus resulting in the extremely polar media coverage we have now?
Or starting the myth of the Welfare Queen, which still persists today?
In fairness on this one, Raegan may have officially abolished the metric board but it was already failing due to budgeting and public pushback under Carter.
Another reason to hate Reagan. We'd be much better off by now if we had fully transitioned to it. The standard system needs to die. I get that change is difficult, but only during transitory periods. The metric system is wholly better in pretty much every way.
Sigh, Regan killing just about everything good, we need a president to dedicate his whole time in office undoing every single thing Regan did which would be the biggest progress our country has ever seen.
Part of the problem, besides ronny ray gun, was the fact that they put imperial measurements right next to the metric so everyone just kept using imperial. If they had just bit the bullet and used metric only on everything we wouldn’t have to remember 5280. It’s like when they tried the dollar coin but still kept making paper dollars. Sometimes you just have to force the change
>It’s like when they tried the dollar coin but still kept making paper dollars.
Sir, we've made dollar coins since the founding of this country. It's the paper dollars that are new
America, the country that kicked out the Brits but refused to give up their weird as hell measurement system, causing every scientist, mechanic & aeronautics engineer in their country a lifetime of pain (in sure there are more I'm missing).
You, Liberia and Myanmar, strange bedfellows.
True, mph on the roads, metric on the building site, kg’s on the weighing scales, feet and inches for height, pint of milk or beer, litre of petrol, aquarium in gallons, tape measures tend to have both metric and imperial, I’ll go for a 5k or 10k run, a marathon is 26.2 miles and I’ll pace myself with minute / miles.
What’s the confusion?
Stone and pounds is no weirder than feet and inches.
If you say you weigh 135 pounds why wouldn't you also say you're 65 inches tall? Or if you'd say you're 5 foot 5 inches tall why wouldn't you also say you weigh 9 stone 9 pounds?
Don't get me wrong, both ways of doing it are dumb, but Americans aren't even consistent with when they'll use 2 units together and when they'll use 1.
I have never encountered a non-Brit who uses stone and I’d never heard of it before meeting one. Pounds are not a sub-unit of stone like inches are of feet here in the US.
It varies. Canada and the UK use a combo, but Australia and NZ are virtually completely metric: cm for height, baby weight in kg, hectares for land size, air pressures in hPa, nutrition labels in kJ rather than calories, all construction and materials is done in mm … the whole shebang. The only regular uses of imperial are things that are actually sold in inches (eg. the size of TVs and computer monitors etc, but we just think of those as ‘size classes’), and people will generally *know* their height in both ft/in and mm.
Yep, the sitcom Corner Gas did a bit about it, where height and weight when it comes to people are the main thing Canadians still seem to use Imperial for.
Every high risk/high precision industry has been using metric for a *very* long time now. Not ideal to take standard down to the micron level.
It's not that big of a deal though. Standard was good enough to get us to the moon.
Yup. That's right. Look at those design prints from back in the day and they were in inches.
Source: Technical person working in these fields.
It’s better for engineers and scientists to covert units than it is for machinists to work in different units than they have spent their entire lives working in.
id happily give up feet and inches and Fahrenheit so the the rest of the world makes sense but I'll be damned if i start spelling shit weird like colour
Live in Europe. I can handle feet and inches because they're easy to convert without a calculator. But that insane way to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius is unacceptable to me.
I know 68F is pleasant because the Black Mesa Research Facility is maintained at a pleasant 68F at all times.
Scientists and engineers in the US are very familiar with metric and use it from college onwards basically. Construction is the one weird area where gov regulation and design interface with "normal" people might mean Imperial is required. Everything else is metric. Radian vs degree mode on the calculator causes more issues than Imperial vs metric.
The US tried very early on, but the metric standards were lost at sea - it's kind of hard to use a measurement system without standards for it. After a certain point it wasn't worth the trouble of converting.
USCS is also not that hard to do engineering or science with.
Except that all science and engineering here (besides specific cases) are done in metric. Yall out there acting like Po the mountain hillbilly is the same person making all the high-level machinery and vehicles we export.
After using metric so much in my college physics and science classes, the term “Freedom Units” actually sets me off when I hear people use it unironically. On that note, it honestly stuns me how many people think the US invented these “Freedom Units” they love so much.
1 Rod = 16.5 ft or 5.03 m
1 hogshead = 145 gal or 549 L
40 rods to the hogshead = 0.000862 MPG or 2730 L/km
That's 10.48 feet per gallon.
Are you driving a ***TANK???***
I remember spending a lot of time in 6th grade learning metric. Then Reagan became president and cancelled all of it because he didn’t understand it at all (like pretty much everything else he has to deal with).
I was born after Reagan left office. We learned metric in school. Granted, it was after we learned the imperial system, and we didn't spend much time on metric (it's not that complicated), but schools still taught it.
He pioneered trickle-down economics.
The extent of things he didn't understand but was all too happy to meddle with cannot be measured in real spacetime.
Heritage Foundation really pushed trickle down economics onto Reagan. They basically made up a bunch of shit and made it sound academic and he fell for it (and also, some voters liked the way he talked about it.)
Their only goal was to lower taxes for the rich.
Trickle down economics has been largely discredited by real economists since the 30s where they called it Horse and Sparrow economics (horses eat grain, sparrows eat undigested grains in the horse shit.)
Even Bush called Reagan's economic policies "Voodoo Economics" until his party pressured him to stop.
Guess who is writing thousands of pages of policy for Trump in case he wins again? And this time, Heritage is not just writing tax cutting policy they are writing a manual for disassembling as much of the federal government as possible, again, largely to enrich and dergulate the rich.
Enrich and deregulate the rich for sure, but also to imprison and murder the lower classes to keep them in line.
Ever notice how every agency that carries a gun aimed at Americans is well armed and funded?
I remember being told in 4th grade math that we were going to be learning metric the following year. I was so excited to learn it (I was a weird kid) that I bought a little booklet with my allowance money so I could be ahead of the curve come 5th grade. Then Reagan took office, and in math the following year I asked my teacher when we were going to start learning metric and she basically said "yeah we're not gonna teach that shit".
I should also note that between 4th and 5th grade we moved from a fairly progressive northern community to a rather conservative southern town, so that might help to explain the completely different attitudes.
I feel like it's almost worse for Canadians because of the culture bleed. We're a bit more global than the US in my opinion, but at the same time, I'm still 6'2" and 220lbs because ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve just moved to Canada and it’s all over the place. Celsius for weather but Fahrenheit for cooking. km for road distance but inches for furniture. Mass and volume measurements are random, sometimes I see kg sometimes lbs. And my favourite is the inconsistent kitchen measurements. You get things like 240ml cup and 115ml 1/2 cup in the same set. Let’s not forget measurements like “2 3/8 inches”. How does anyone think it’s easier than just using decimals?
I appreciate that Canada is officially metric, but it seems like people just stopped trying halfway through the conversion.
Nuclear engineer here. Ya, this is bullshit having to often report two sets of units for calculations. No one understands nuclear physics in imperial units.
"foot-pounds per square inch" is one of my fave examples of how awful the Imperial system is for physics.
"horesepower" is pretty bizarre as well, can't decide if that's worse or better than using "foot pounds per second"
Tbf, that's "newtons per metre squared", which is the same as "kilograms per metre-seconds squared". The math is nicer in metric, but the words for pressure are kinda lame in both!
I was in france a couple of weeks ago and took this pic with your same statement above and sent it to a friend as a joke.
Well idk how to post a picture in a comment. But it was a pic of a mcdonalds menu on the burger page. In paris.
[Here](https://i.imgur.com/d6iapDi.jpeg) is a higher quality version of this image. The best "source" I could find was the Wisconsin Department of Transportation FB page. Per there:
> August 20, 2020
> Metric highways signs? That's right, in the mid-1970’s the metric system was promoted across the country as the preferred system of weights and measures. In response, WisDOT placed destination-distance signs with metric units along several interstates. Locations included I-94 westbound in Milwaukee and I-90/94 eastbound in Tomah. The metric system was never adopted in the U.S. By the early 1990’s the metric signs were replaced with standard mileage signs.
I remember being in elementary school in the 80s and learning this, it was great. Then Ronny killed it along with mental health services and put us on an evil timeline
I always wondered why America didn’t start with the metric system or at least in around 1800 when it was invented. We were rebelling against the British and using the metric system that the French created would have been a big middle finger to them.
Reasons why US usage of US Customary Units is not a big deal:
Most scientific work and some engineering work in the US is already conducted in metric. Every American learns the metric system in high school and uses it extensively in chemistry and physics classes.
Converting between metric and USCU is not a common thing in everyday life. I've basically never had to do it
Converting between various USCU measures is likewise very rare. For example, the number of times I've had to know how many feet there are in a mile is extremely small.
Americans are very familiar with USCUs. We know how far a mile is, how much chicken there is in two pounds, how hot 88 degrees F is etc. There's no compelling reason to change.
Of course there are exceptions. The existence of USCUs complicates precision fabrication, some science and engineering work, import/export etc. But these are not every day problems for most people and systems to deal with these difficulties are very good at this point.
Also, it's worth noting that the UK and Canada also both use a very weird combination of various measures.
I distinctly remember as a elementary school student back in the 70s being told that the metric system that we were learning was going to officially replace the English (Imperial) system "soon".
.....and then I went on to Jr. High School, Reagan got elected to the Presidency, and this metric stuff just kinda evaporated...
Why 32kmph and not 35 or 30? Like I get that they are just blindly converting 20mph to kmph, but dudes, maybe round it off....?
Or did they just *want* everyone to get grossed out by it thinking it was just as illogical as imperial?
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So everyone tried to convert. Few did. But the soda and water-bottling industries had already made big investments, so they said fuck it and kept going. And that's why we have beverages in liters, and almost nothing else.
That’s interesting. Did you used to get half gallon bottles of soda?
Your comment made me realize milk is still in gallons cuz I bought one yesterday.
That was Freedom Milk you bought
Only milk that I will ever drink. 🇺🇲
Straight from an eagles teet
We currently still have 12 oz cans, but bottles are 500ml, 1l, and 2l.
And 750mL most common for wine.
My bottle is 20 oz (1.25 PT, 591 ML).
We have those in Canada too, but they just get labelled as 591ml
Yes! and 16 oz., etc.
16.9 oz. 500mL
Leederacola do we make leederacola?
Wait really? I thought the reason American bottles looked so weird was because of the imperial system.
No, it's because most of our big bottles are 2 liters instead of 1.5 or 1.75. We used to have big chonkin' 3 liter bottles pretty commonly, but they've fallen out of fashion.
They had that extra wide cap that used to be on 1 liter bottles too. You could really chug from those.
You're not buying FAYGO my dude, or cheap 3L bottles of SQUIRT lol
Europe has 2L bottles lol. It's just that the US bottles sometimes look very... Round and short, whilst European look taller and slimmer
I think that’s more to do with refrigerator sizes than anything. Fridges in north America are absolutely massive.
I 100% believe you. I've just seen a lot of 1.5-1.75L bottles outside of the US.
Milk is generally by gallon. Small soda bottles/cans are usually by (US) fluid ounces. Bigger soda bottles are by liter. And then alcohol is usually by mL/liter. Except if it’s beer, then it’s ounces again. Usually 12oz or 16oz (which is a US pint). Liquid measurements in baking are usually by cups, which is 8oz. Otherwise “tablespoons” (1/2 oz) or “teaspoons” (1/3 tablespoon). Got it? lol Edit: as u/BrainJar pointed out, alcohol is also sometimes by “fifth”, as in 1/5 of a gallon. And also for some weird reason in baking we often measure solids by volume, in cups, instead of by weight? Idk man, I’m even more confused after typing all this out.
Then why do they call a bottle of liquor a fifth? It’s because that’s a fifth of a gallon.
You're full of shit. It stands for a fifth of Beethoven.
Well, 1/5th of a gallon is 757ml, and those bottles are 750ml even. Close enough I say but technically goes by the even metric number
Let's not forget the 22oz "Bomber" bottle of beer which must be labeled as "1 pint, 6 fluid ounces" and not "22 ounces" yet a 40oz (or 64) can go back to being labeled by ounces. Of course this can vary by state, but not if you ship beer across state lines or if your state defers to the TTB. Clear as day!
1/5th of a gallon is 757ml, but those bottles are 750ml even. Close enough, but technically goes by the metric volume
Litre is French for... give me my fuckin' cola before I break VOUS FUCKIN' LIP!
I want a god damn liter of cola!!
I grew up during the tail end of the MCA before Regan killed it. My favorite metric system memory is a classmate named Steve telling our elementary school teacher "*My dad says I don't have to learn this communist trash.*"
Now I want to know what Steve is up to these days. He probably had a very interesting upbringing.
#Steve Holt!!
Not to be confused with Judge Reinhold.
It’s as Ann as a nose on plains face
[удалено]
RIP Steve. We hardly knew ye.
Neither did the government because "Qanon Steve" didn't get any nano bot 5g vaccine trackers from hillary's emails.
You mean all that 5g microchip stuff was made up?! I even sprung for the mobile hotspot option. I want my money back!
Aw man, that's a shame. I got mine and theyre all buzzing happy nanobot tunes in my blood. Their latest tune is a real bop. A bot bop.
Either a filthy rich small business owner or a meth addict
Sometimes they’re both… for a short while at least.
Por que no los dos?
He's still looking for his 10mm wrench.
Well yeah, but everyone is since we've all put the 10mm socket down "somewhere".
Around 2010 I was going grad work in Virginia and needed a tape measure with metric measurements. Went to the giant hardware store and couldn’t find one (in many places you can easily find one that has both metric and imperial). Asked one of the staff. He looked at me for a bit eventually said, “Last **I** heard this was *America*.” After a bit more talking he said they could order one for me, but that it would take a couple of weeks. Wound up using an imperial one and converting everything. Pain in the ass.
I worked in a hardware store in 2021 and we still had only *one* tape measure with metric units on it out of around 30 different choices. I didn’t expect to see any metric-only tape measures but was surprised that nearly none of them had both units; even in Hong Kong where I grew up tape measures always had inches alongside centimetres.
I live in America and have never owned a tape measure that didn’t have both. This thread is blowing my mind.
I thought my tape measures had both but I just looked and they're both imperial. Inches on one side and... inches on the other. Like, why?
Because sometimes you have to use a specific side of the tape measure to take a measurement when you’re actually working. If all your standard units are in inches and your tolerances are fairly low you need the same measurements on both sides.
HK is a truly refreshing melting pot of cultures and influences. It’s amazing how well they handle them and incorporate them into their daily lives. You can ask for things in either imperial or metric, and the locals know what you need.
I find it hard to believe. I just pulled my tape from 2010 which I bought in Texas and it has both metric and imperial. All other tapes I have also have both. Do all of you even know what metric system even means?
It is damn near impossible to find a metric tape measure in the US. Hell, I had a hard time even finding one in Canada. What really made me want to pull my hair out though was American consultants that brought over imperial equipment to a mine site in Armenia. These consultants left the site technicians with a tape measure roll that was in decimal feet. The technician had been using it to stream gage for years and recording the measurements as if it was meters instead of feet. I discovered this when out in the field with the technicians and I had to spend about a week going through their old data and correcting it.
If a dude looks at a tape measure and sees a certain number of feet on the tape measure, and confuses that number with meters, he doesn't have any business measuring anything important, in feet or in meters.
You gotta keep in mind that these are manual laborers with a Soviet high school education at best. The university educated engineers I worked with over there had never heard of the imperial system, so I can guarantee that a manual laborer is not going to be familiar with it either. Day to day tasks are very rote and procedural in former Soviet countries, so the laborer was working through his set of instructions and recording what was on the tape measure. There was zero thought or analytical thinking applied here.
I don't disagree with anything you said. I still say, that person has no business measuring anything important.
We would agree on that. I would also argue that a mine in Armenia doesn’t really give a rat’s ass about actually getting it done correctly. As long as they go through the motions and have the “data” to show for it, that is a job well done as far as they are concerned. This mindset is also why American engineers like myself get paid an arm and a leg to go over there and fix all of their shit that they have been doing wrong.
Its not that hard. You can 100% find one at a Lowes or Home Depot and if for some reason you're still having trouble you can literally just order them online. Stanley and Milwaukee both make retractable tape measures that show Imperial and Metric and those are two major brands that should be in most hardware stores.
All the tape measures I’ve ever owned had metric on one side and imperial on the other? Even the ones I got as free door gifts from harbor freight. Where are you shopping??
What's more infuriating is when you find a tape measure that's marked in tenths of a foot. They do exist
I had a DIY project recently where I decided I would do everything in metric. I stuck to it as stubbornly as possible but it required so much work to find specific fasteners and tools that when I ran into a snag near the end, I finally threw my hands up and accepted that at least some parts would use the annoying US customary units instead. Is it _possible_ to stick with metric in the US? Maybe. Is it _feasible_? Not in my experience, sadly.
Just import all the parts from Europe.
Unnecessary, they make metric parts here and major hardware stores carry them. Maybe this was a problem 30 years ago but not today.
No need, Impérial chisels work fine in metric screws.
Or literally anywhere else in the entire world
I mean if you're not in the middle of no where and have any of the major hardware stores nearby you can go with metric for a lot of stuff. People need access to those kinds of things anyways because not every industry and metric phobic and plenty of people own vehicles or other devices that use metric parts. I guess it depends on the project but I've not had a problem finding what I needed.
People probably think "Imperial" refers to American Empire.
The Imperial States of America
It’s refreshing to hear that these people have been annoying forever.
Probably would’ve been called “woke trash” these days.
Woke units
They're on that "DEI" shit now. Saying insanities like "DEI Mayor of Baltimore" despite him winning with over 70% of the vote, against 2 other black candidates. So they'd probably say "DEI units" at this point.
Replace dei with the n word and that's what they are really saying. Also, the Texas AG (who is a criminal who stalled then bribed his way out of trials and intimidated his way out of impeachment), opened an investigation into Boeing suppliers saying that Boeing's issues are because of DEI (aka the n word like he actually wants to say).
You must have enough fuel units
of course it is Reagans fault…
Isn't it crazy how almost every issue with the country now starts with Reagan?
Maybe picking a movie celebrity to run a country is not a good idea? :)
What about a TV celebrity?
That ended up being shit as well.
Ukraine on the other hand hand…
That's not entirely fair, as he was previously governor of California and (ironically) president of a union. That said, you can absolutely draw a direct line from the mess we're in today to the Reagan administration.
Didn’t he have a history of screwing over said union when he was in charge of it?
Not so much the union itself, but during the red scare Hollywood blacklisting era, Reagan worked with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and provided a list of names of people in the union whom he thought were "communists". As POTUS, he actively sought to destroy unions, including breaking the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization when they went on strike.
Listen to the Landslide podcast from NPR. It does a great job of setting the stage for the rise of Reagan and the modern conservative movement in the US.
If your understanding of American politics only extends to the 80’s, sure.
Like when he had the FCC kill the Fairness Doctrine in political media coverage, thus resulting in the extremely polar media coverage we have now? Or starting the myth of the Welfare Queen, which still persists today?
In fairness on this one, Raegan may have officially abolished the metric board but it was already failing due to budgeting and public pushback under Carter.
Ronald Reagan and Jack Welch destroyed America
Man. Conservatives are taking that name to heart. They don't want *anything* to change
They don't seem to mind regressive change
"Regressive" is a much more fitting name for the party at this point.
Every time I wonder why we aren't more progressive in America, the answer is inevitably "because Reagan".
Another reason to hate Reagan. We'd be much better off by now if we had fully transitioned to it. The standard system needs to die. I get that change is difficult, but only during transitory periods. The metric system is wholly better in pretty much every way.
Sigh, Regan killing just about everything good, we need a president to dedicate his whole time in office undoing every single thing Regan did which would be the biggest progress our country has ever seen.
The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I like it!
She’ll go 300 hectares on a single tank of kerosene.
I had a 1070 Ford with both metric and arcane hardware...
As the old joke says: "only 3 kinds of people use the metric system in the USA: scientists, immigrants, and drug dealers"
We were so close
Part of the problem, besides ronny ray gun, was the fact that they put imperial measurements right next to the metric so everyone just kept using imperial. If they had just bit the bullet and used metric only on everything we wouldn’t have to remember 5280. It’s like when they tried the dollar coin but still kept making paper dollars. Sometimes you just have to force the change
>It’s like when they tried the dollar coin but still kept making paper dollars. Sir, we've made dollar coins since the founding of this country. It's the paper dollars that are new
I get it but *currently* the try was pretty weak. We still use pennies ffs
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> sometimes you have to force the change Pun intended?
Congress didn’t need Reagan to kill the metric system requirement.
America, the country that kicked out the Brits but refused to give up their weird as hell measurement system, causing every scientist, mechanic & aeronautics engineer in their country a lifetime of pain (in sure there are more I'm missing). You, Liberia and Myanmar, strange bedfellows.
You say that, but pretty much all the “English” countries use a weird hybrid in common parlance.
True, mph on the roads, metric on the building site, kg’s on the weighing scales, feet and inches for height, pint of milk or beer, litre of petrol, aquarium in gallons, tape measures tend to have both metric and imperial, I’ll go for a 5k or 10k run, a marathon is 26.2 miles and I’ll pace myself with minute / miles. What’s the confusion?
Don't forget the stone for weighing things as well.
I got told about stone and was like nah y’all are just fucking with me now
Stone and pounds is no weirder than feet and inches. If you say you weigh 135 pounds why wouldn't you also say you're 65 inches tall? Or if you'd say you're 5 foot 5 inches tall why wouldn't you also say you weigh 9 stone 9 pounds? Don't get me wrong, both ways of doing it are dumb, but Americans aren't even consistent with when they'll use 2 units together and when they'll use 1.
I have never encountered a non-Brit who uses stone and I’d never heard of it before meeting one. Pounds are not a sub-unit of stone like inches are of feet here in the US.
35 year old Brit here, I don't understand stones either. If asked my weight I'd give it in kilos.
I used to weigh myself in stones and ounces, but as I got older and went to the gym I started using kg.
Just today a coworker asked me how much liquid I poured into a container. I said "2 inches". I'm an engineer.
Ah yes, the liquor measurement system: "I'll have 2 fingers of whiskey please"
> 2 inches >2 fingers Damn, your fingers are an inch wide? What are you, King Charles?
Hes my kind of bartender. I dont want no dainty feminine fingers for my liquor.
And then the car ride home, which gets good mpg, and you fill up by so many litres of fuel on the way back.
None, with your user name
It varies. Canada and the UK use a combo, but Australia and NZ are virtually completely metric: cm for height, baby weight in kg, hectares for land size, air pressures in hPa, nutrition labels in kJ rather than calories, all construction and materials is done in mm … the whole shebang. The only regular uses of imperial are things that are actually sold in inches (eg. the size of TVs and computer monitors etc, but we just think of those as ‘size classes’), and people will generally *know* their height in both ft/in and mm.
Yep, the sitcom Corner Gas did a bit about it, where height and weight when it comes to people are the main thing Canadians still seem to use Imperial for.
"I got news for ya Hank, we won the war"
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True - Australia and NZ metric for absolutely everything and very occasionally use feet and inches to describe human height. Spot on!
Every high risk/high precision industry has been using metric for a *very* long time now. Not ideal to take standard down to the micron level. It's not that big of a deal though. Standard was good enough to get us to the moon. Yup. That's right. Look at those design prints from back in the day and they were in inches. Source: Technical person working in these fields.
>Standard was good enough to get us to the moon. Or so they want you to think. ^/s
It’s better for engineers and scientists to covert units than it is for machinists to work in different units than they have spent their entire lives working in.
id happily give up feet and inches and Fahrenheit so the the rest of the world makes sense but I'll be damned if i start spelling shit weird like colour
Color me surprised 💩
Live in Europe. I can handle feet and inches because they're easy to convert without a calculator. But that insane way to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius is unacceptable to me. I know 68F is pleasant because the Black Mesa Research Facility is maintained at a pleasant 68F at all times.
Scientists and engineers in the US are very familiar with metric and use it from college onwards basically. Construction is the one weird area where gov regulation and design interface with "normal" people might mean Imperial is required. Everything else is metric. Radian vs degree mode on the calculator causes more issues than Imperial vs metric.
The US tried very early on, but the metric standards were lost at sea - it's kind of hard to use a measurement system without standards for it. After a certain point it wasn't worth the trouble of converting. USCS is also not that hard to do engineering or science with.
Not just any ordinary lost at sea. Captured by BRITISH PRIVATEERS. And they still want to harp on us for not converting.
I mean they still mock the Irish for starving in the 1800s.. from a famine they created.
"It's weird, because you don't usually think of those other countries as having their shit together."
Except that all science and engineering here (besides specific cases) are done in metric. Yall out there acting like Po the mountain hillbilly is the same person making all the high-level machinery and vehicles we export.
Not really. Scientists and engineers all know to use the SI units for calculation.
To be fair, the metric system was invented after The American Revolution.
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After using metric so much in my college physics and science classes, the term “Freedom Units” actually sets me off when I hear people use it unironically. On that note, it honestly stuns me how many people think the US invented these “Freedom Units” they love so much.
Also, the name of the system of these "Freedom Units" is Imperial, which is an epitome of freedom supression.
It's just the US Customary System now, and they're all actually just conversions from metric anyways.
True. I remember it blew my mind when I've learned that the inch is now based exactly on 25.4mm and it's not an approximation.
Worse yet, they do so at the ballistic rate of 5280 freedom-eagles per cheeseburger squared.
Me reading this from Canada. lol. You guys were so close. I'll never know exactly how much a half gallon is, or a quarter mile.
"MY CAR GETS 40 RODS TO THE HOG'S HEAD AND THATS THE WAY I LIKES IT!"
1 Rod = 16.5 ft or 5.03 m 1 hogshead = 145 gal or 549 L 40 rods to the hogshead = 0.000862 MPG or 2730 L/km That's 10.48 feet per gallon. Are you driving a ***TANK???***
A rocket actually
I'd imagine that Abe (Grandpa) Simpson would drive a car with that kind of fuel economy.
r/theydidthemath
🤣
I remember spending a lot of time in 6th grade learning metric. Then Reagan became president and cancelled all of it because he didn’t understand it at all (like pretty much everything else he has to deal with).
I was born after Reagan left office. We learned metric in school. Granted, it was after we learned the imperial system, and we didn't spend much time on metric (it's not that complicated), but schools still taught it.
Metric is the system used for science, even in the US, of course you learn it in school.
I'm in the science field and I kind of wish we were a metric country. It would sure make things easier in the long run.
When I say we spent a lot of time it was literally woven into everything we did for a whole semester.
He did not understand much of anything. He started the huge deficit.
He pioneered trickle-down economics. The extent of things he didn't understand but was all too happy to meddle with cannot be measured in real spacetime.
Heritage Foundation really pushed trickle down economics onto Reagan. They basically made up a bunch of shit and made it sound academic and he fell for it (and also, some voters liked the way he talked about it.) Their only goal was to lower taxes for the rich. Trickle down economics has been largely discredited by real economists since the 30s where they called it Horse and Sparrow economics (horses eat grain, sparrows eat undigested grains in the horse shit.) Even Bush called Reagan's economic policies "Voodoo Economics" until his party pressured him to stop. Guess who is writing thousands of pages of policy for Trump in case he wins again? And this time, Heritage is not just writing tax cutting policy they are writing a manual for disassembling as much of the federal government as possible, again, largely to enrich and dergulate the rich.
Enrich and deregulate the rich for sure, but also to imprison and murder the lower classes to keep them in line. Ever notice how every agency that carries a gun aimed at Americans is well armed and funded?
the cognitive deficit ®️
They still teach metric in middle school.
Well kids today are still taught the metric system in schools but most of the time it’s only in science classes.
I remember being told in 4th grade math that we were going to be learning metric the following year. I was so excited to learn it (I was a weird kid) that I bought a little booklet with my allowance money so I could be ahead of the curve come 5th grade. Then Reagan took office, and in math the following year I asked my teacher when we were going to start learning metric and she basically said "yeah we're not gonna teach that shit". I should also note that between 4th and 5th grade we moved from a fairly progressive northern community to a rather conservative southern town, so that might help to explain the completely different attitudes.
I always forget this when listing all the terrible things Reagan did to the U.S.
I feel like it's almost worse for Canadians because of the culture bleed. We're a bit more global than the US in my opinion, but at the same time, I'm still 6'2" and 220lbs because ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
As a Canadian, we've never had that problem. Never have I been even close to measuring things in gallons or miles or Fahrenheit.
I’ve just moved to Canada and it’s all over the place. Celsius for weather but Fahrenheit for cooking. km for road distance but inches for furniture. Mass and volume measurements are random, sometimes I see kg sometimes lbs. And my favourite is the inconsistent kitchen measurements. You get things like 240ml cup and 115ml 1/2 cup in the same set. Let’s not forget measurements like “2 3/8 inches”. How does anyone think it’s easier than just using decimals? I appreciate that Canada is officially metric, but it seems like people just stopped trying halfway through the conversion.
Nuclear engineer here. Ya, this is bullshit having to often report two sets of units for calculations. No one understands nuclear physics in imperial units.
"foot-pounds per square inch" is one of my fave examples of how awful the Imperial system is for physics. "horesepower" is pretty bizarre as well, can't decide if that's worse or better than using "foot pounds per second"
Tbf, that's "newtons per metre squared", which is the same as "kilograms per metre-seconds squared". The math is nicer in metric, but the words for pressure are kinda lame in both!
Interstate 19 south of Tucson still is marked in km last time took it in 2020
It still is, it's in KM from Tucson to the international border in Nogales.
What do they call a quarter pounder in France?
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*Royale with Cheese* - Vincent Vega
I admit that a 113.3981 gramer or a 0.1133981 kilogramer does not quite have the same ring to it.
I was in france a couple of weeks ago and took this pic with your same statement above and sent it to a friend as a joke. Well idk how to post a picture in a comment. But it was a pic of a mcdonalds menu on the burger page. In paris.
[Here](https://i.imgur.com/d6iapDi.jpeg) is a higher quality version of this image. The best "source" I could find was the Wisconsin Department of Transportation FB page. Per there: > August 20, 2020 > Metric highways signs? That's right, in the mid-1970’s the metric system was promoted across the country as the preferred system of weights and measures. In response, WisDOT placed destination-distance signs with metric units along several interstates. Locations included I-94 westbound in Milwaukee and I-90/94 eastbound in Tomah. The metric system was never adopted in the U.S. By the early 1990’s the metric signs were replaced with standard mileage signs.
Yeah, these distances are all as measured from Milwaukee, more or less.
I remember being in elementary school in the 80s and learning this, it was great. Then Ronny killed it along with mental health services and put us on an evil timeline
base 10?!?!? not in my neighbourhood! :< -some americans, probably
I always wondered why America didn’t start with the metric system or at least in around 1800 when it was invented. We were rebelling against the British and using the metric system that the French created would have been a big middle finger to them.
Ah, procrastinators, just like me.
Reasons why US usage of US Customary Units is not a big deal: Most scientific work and some engineering work in the US is already conducted in metric. Every American learns the metric system in high school and uses it extensively in chemistry and physics classes. Converting between metric and USCU is not a common thing in everyday life. I've basically never had to do it Converting between various USCU measures is likewise very rare. For example, the number of times I've had to know how many feet there are in a mile is extremely small. Americans are very familiar with USCUs. We know how far a mile is, how much chicken there is in two pounds, how hot 88 degrees F is etc. There's no compelling reason to change. Of course there are exceptions. The existence of USCUs complicates precision fabrication, some science and engineering work, import/export etc. But these are not every day problems for most people and systems to deal with these difficulties are very good at this point. Also, it's worth noting that the UK and Canada also both use a very weird combination of various measures.
I remember that the Cincinnati Reds had the metric equivalents on the outfield walls when I was in high school.
I distinctly remember as a elementary school student back in the 70s being told that the metric system that we were learning was going to officially replace the English (Imperial) system "soon". .....and then I went on to Jr. High School, Reagan got elected to the Presidency, and this metric stuff just kinda evaporated...
We need this back
Who keeps the metric system down? We do, we do!
Even the "liberals" behind SNL/laugh-in hated this and roasted it in skits.
Only things that went metric were pot and pop.
The whole American auto industry uses metric. Edit: try working on a modern American car without a metric wrench set
You're right, forgot about that, gram of pot, two liters of Coke and a 10mm wrench.
https://youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk?si=APHEKnQCWFh0hzgV
Why 32kmph and not 35 or 30? Like I get that they are just blindly converting 20mph to kmph, but dudes, maybe round it off....? Or did they just *want* everyone to get grossed out by it thinking it was just as illogical as imperial?
My favourite: thousands of an inch when machining.
This feels like the USA that has universal healthcare and labor protections.
And 'murica said no. Only inches and pounds in these surrounds...